Yahoo Finance 'How I built £100m bathroom business Plumbworld'
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Over the last 25 years since he founded Plumbworld, James Hickman has sold his business, bought it back, sold for a second time and is still at the helm of one of the UK’s biggest online bathroom and plumbing retailers. “I can’t seem to let it go,” Hickman muses of his rollercoaster career.
Plumbworld, which employs 200 staff, turned over £100m in sales last year and Hickman’s encyclopedic knowledge and investment in technology and e-commerce has been the cornerstone of success for the Evesham-based firm. It is no surprise, then, to hear that of Plumbworld’s four-strong board, three are accountants and all are “IT geeks”.
After dropping out of a physics degree at Imperial College, Hickman first trained as an accountant for a water controls’ firm. While there, he helped out in marketing and ended up building the firm’s first website. Hickman soon resigned from his job and delved into the world of website design, building sites for other large plumbing players.
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After buying a series of ‘how to’ books from Waterstones, Hickman taught himself coding and took on clients such as Golf Online, now the UK’s biggest retailer in the sport, before setting up his own plumbing B2B, pivoting into the bathroom space and closing the website business down.
“I was in that intriguing position of having a great business but had no money,” he recalls. “I needed a way to finance the growth.”
He took the decision to sell a 25% stake in the business to one of his first suppliers, with the view to a later buyout. The deal provided Hickman with warehouse space and a marketing budget, the business growing to such an extent that, five years later, it was bigger than their UK subsidiary.
Thus, another deal was then thrashed out where Hickman bought back the 25% stake for £250. Eighteen months later, Plumbworld was sold for £7.1m to builders merchants business Grafton Group. Aged 37, Hickman now found himself at a loose end. “I don’t like golf, gardening and was too young to retire,” he says.
Instead, he carried on running the business with Grafton Group, freely admitting that growth slowed in the arms of a large corporate and wasn't as dynamic as he envisaged. Twelve years later, Hickman was asked if he would consider a managing buyout and purchased the business back in 2018. Freed from corporate constraints, Hickman says the business went from “strength to strength”.
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Three years further on, after £500,000 operating earnings, Plumbworld was making £10m before Hickman sold to private equity owned Highbourne Group in 2022. It allowed the business to invest in a new warehouse, double stock, product range and recruit employees at market rates rather than on a corporate pay structure. “It really was like putting foot on the gas and taking off,” adds Hickman.
Of the 200 staff, 170 are at its Worcestershire headquarters and 30 employees at the company's call centre in Barrowford, Lancashire. Over 25 years, Plumbworld has catered to over three million customers — with female consumers accounting for 55% of sales — and hasn’t shied away from its initial business plan.
“The strategy was always to provide good value bathroom products with attractive designs at affordable prices,” says Hickman. “The competitive advantage is in securing the right design products at the right price.
“It’s about educating and reassurance for being a successful retailer online. If you have to get someone to trust you with a product without ever seeing it, you need to go the extra mile to explain the product and remove any fear of purchase [the firm offers one-year warranties].”
As a self-confessed book hoarder, Hickman still has those half dozen books on coding that he purchased before the rise of Google and Amazon.
With Plumbworld celebrating its 25th anniversary, Hickman says that doubling turnover is the next "doable" challenge. “It’s got to be £200m next for us as the milestone,” adds the entrepreneur.
Behind the brand: Plumbworld founder on
Leadership style
We call our top team ‘player managers’. We like to roll our sleeves up and get involved in the nitty gritty. We are a board of four, three of whom are accountants, and we are all IT geeks as well. It’s a strange team in that respect but it’s about leading from the front. A lot of companies offer mission statements and values but they are meaningless on a bit of paper.
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We are out there demonstrating what we believe in front of our staff. You have to live the culture and keep people who are immersed in it. We are ruthless at getting rid of people who don’t fit the culture. It’s the old adage of ‘one bad apple’. No matter how good they are, if they don’t fit the culture, we won’t keep them.
I’m a believer in hiring the right people and then getting out of their way. There’s no point micromanaging people. The best people flourish with the more autonomy you give them. The more power you devolve, the better the result.
Product range
We focus on the low to middle end consumer bathroom market. The bathroom market is a funny one as there aren’t that many strong brands. You ask a consumer to reel off a shower brand and they could name two or three, but for toilet, tap brands or bathroom furniture, there isn’t a lot of knowledge. But it does open the door for nicely designed products in our house brands to slot into the market.
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